For,
as we have said, the art of the sophist is a money-making art which trades on apparent wisdom, and
so sophists aim at apparent proof... for
sophistry is an appearance of wisdom without reality.----Aristotle

It's theft, pure and simple, of the poor by the corporate elite.
Witness the private paramilitary (many Israeli) now patrolling the
streets of New Orleans, preparing for "gentrification (i.e., theft from
mostly poor Black people of their "former" homes). This is what
"free market radicals" (such as Rand) have wanted for decades. Now
we've got it. In brief, what America has is no longer a government
but corporate mafia rule.

The Relation between Capitalism and Freedom is Inverse

Contrary to what my old college professor Milton, and old college chum
David Friedman are fond of telling people, to say nothing of the
goddess of darkness that is the central topic of this site, pure Laissez Faire
capitalism is not a necessary precondition for personal liberty and
freedom. Nor is even the less pure, stinky kind we have in the world
today. The reason for this is actually quite simple: the more big
business you have, the greater the concentration of economic power you
are going to have. Even former Michigan governor, and 1968 Republican
presidential primary candidate, George Romney knew that; and at
the 1968 convention, his delegates tried unsuccessfully to put forth a
Republican platform plank opposing such massive concentrations of
economic power. No, Romney would not have been as good as RFK, but he
would have been a hell of a lot better than Nixon. Too bad he told the
world he was changing his position on the Vietnam War to one of
opposition from former support because he had formerly been
"brainwashed" by the Johnson administration. That single word was fatal
to his campaign.
Case in point: City of San Clemente, very
recently. A street busker, a clarinetist named Patrick Crosby, after 2
years of playing in the same general area to the delight of most, had a
little verbal spat with a manager of the largest employer in town, a
bar and restaurant establishment called the Fisherman's, located on San Clemente's municipal
pier. The Fishermans' calls their buddies, the deputies of the Orange
County Sheriff (a man himself surrounded by scandal, named Mike Corona)
and Crosby is verbally abused, and given a misdemeanor citation for "not having a special event
permit." later changed, reportedly, to "operating without a business
license."
Just in case anyone doesn't know, what Crosby, a solo
act, not obstructing pedestrian traffic, was doing is protected under
the First Amendment. But in places like Orange County, California, big
money and big business trump the US Constitution. Crosby will literally
need to make a federal case of his ordeal. Although he will, most
people in his situation would not be able to for economic reasons. So
much for capitalism and freedom. When Ayn Rand and my old college chum
David, and his dad Milton, speak of the freedom that goes along with
capitalism, they may think
they're talking about the kind of freedom that was recently stolen from
Patrick Crosby, but they're not. What they're really talking about is
the freedom of the rich and powerful to dominate and oppress others.
This is what "capitalism and freedom" means now, and what it has always
meant.
Who was the fountainhead, the
one who paved the way culturally, for
the neoconservative,
neofascist, racistLaissez
Faire Capitalist thugs
(in government, in the oil industry, and companies like Dick Cheney's
Halliburten) that are now fully in
control of the U.S. government? Whose portrait is proudly displayed in
the Washington D.C. office of the neofascist right wing "think tank"
(actually, propaganda mill) called the Cato Institute? And
who was it that founded the new kind of "moral theory" than can
"rationally justify" such
things as deliberate
outright lies
about Weapons of Mass Destruction to the American people and
the world, the mass
murder of hundreds of thousands of Afghanis
and Iraqis with
Bush's illegal and utterly immoral Shock and Awe
campaign, 35,000 or more
severe
American
casualties in those two misadventures, plus an Italian government body
guard here,
or a Reuters sound technician there, murdered in cold blood by U.S.
soldiers, who afterward thought their murderous deed was something to
laugh about? Yes, according to reports I've heard, these
soldiers,
while laughing hysterically, told the brutally murdered (shot
in the face) sound
technician's family that the loved one they lost wasn't really
worth fussing about. Not at all hard to believe--- neither the deed,
nor
a Lt. Col. Steven Boylan's (spokesperson for the U.S. military
in
Iraq and Director of Combined Press Information Center) public
rationalization of the deed on
Democracy Now as
"understandable
under the circumstances," although I'm old enough to know that
Americans didn't used to be this way. Plus, the wholesale suspension
and violation of
Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights and liberties of U.S. Citizens
with the
so called "Patriot Act," (of which "liberal" Sen. Dianne Feinstein is a
strong
supporter) and gross violations of
the Geneva Conventions in the form of prisoner torture? And last but
certainly not least, who laid the "philosophical foundation" for the
decision to cut the budget for levee repair (that
might have saved the lives of
thousands of mostly Democrat
voting African Americans),
on the
part of W. Bush and the Republicans? Look
no further than the "ethics of selfishness" of Ayn Rand. But Rand was
an outspoken atheist, one might counter argue. Aren't Bush and
his cronies all evangelical
Christians?I
will answer that this way: if you truly believe that Bush (or
for
that matter, Pat
Robertson) is a Christian, then
my name's Michael, and I'm what is called an archangel. I also have a
famous toll bridge in New York (Brooklyn specifically) that I'd like to
sell you. In other words, while Bush and some of the
other members
of
the crime
family he calls his Administration do indeed publicly label
themselves Christians, the
truth of the matter is that, again, whether they so label themselves or
not, they're all
a bunch
of Randians, or Objectivists.
Their common "morality" comes not out of the
Bible, but
straight out of the 58 page "Galt's speech" near the end of
Ayn Rand's "literary masterpiece," Atlas Shrugged
(1957), and Ayn Rand's collection of essays, "The Virtue of
Selfishness" (1962).

Who is John Galt?
Perhaps you've seen bumper stickers over the years asking that
question, and wondered. Keep reading,
keep checking for updates to this site. We'll tell you who
this fictional little moron, who knew
nothing, but thought himself entitled to "lay down the law" and rule
everything, really was.
But what's
the big deal about this speech of his? Well, this is no ordinary
speech--- of course, it's not really
even a speech. It's the
full and complete statement of Rand's supposed
"philosophy" of "Objectivism" (another misnomer if there ever was one).
So when we talk about John Galt,
we're really talking
about
Ayn Rand herself. But Ayn Rand liked to harbor the delusion
that
Galt was something more than just a figment of her own imagination. She
speaks of him this way in her essays, and according to Barbara
Branden's biography, The
Passion of Ayn Rand, she spoke of him in every day life as
though he
were something beyond
herself. So, since Ms.
Branden and others in Rand's inner circle went along with this little
delusion of
hers, we
might just as well too. Just don't tell any present day Rand follower
that
there really is no John Galt, please. That would be like
telling a small child
that there is no tooth fairy or No easter Bunny.
So, aside the fact that he had a mother, but no
father
(although he was by no means born of a "virgin"), who was John
Galt? As we will explain, in ever increasing detail as time
goes on, he
was, for starters, an
intellectual
thief who stole a whole scattering ideas and famous
lines from famous philosophers, such as German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, and thereafter claimed them to be his own. What is more,
he
outright lied about what these great thinkers (even Aristotle, the one
he supposedly liked) had said, counting on his listeners to be
too
ignorant, too unintelligent, or too lazy to check him out on his
assertions. Even worse, he claims, at the end of this incredibly long
winded speech, to live by a principle that is completely at odds with
the crude, dog-eat-dog capitalist system he is advocating: that he
will never treat others, merely as a means to his own ends
(this
stolen straight out of Kant, by the way). The reality, of
course is that every
big corporation wants each employee working for it to regard
his or her employment as the single most important thing
in that employee's life (they call this work ethic);
hence it inherently treats employees, basically, little more than as
means to its own corporate ends. This clearly violate Galt's
pledge. (Perhaps after 10 hours of non-stop purple prose, he was
counting on most of listeners to have long since turned him
off). Not
only that, in marketing their goods and services, customers
are
similarly seen as means
toward the end
of corporate profits. Corporations care little whether their goods or
services actually benefit their customers; they merely want to make
them to think
they do (e.g., the cigarette ads of a few decades ago, and fast food
restaurant ads today). In brief, it is the exact opposite of
what Galt pledges that most real businesses (certainly, all big
businesses) operate by: the
corporation rules. What is more, they not only
own society's means of production, for practical purposes, they own the people who live in
the societies they dominate.
If you want to understand why Pat Robertson wants Hugo Chavez
assassinated, this is basically it. Chavez is standing up, and standing
up mightily, to these corporate scoundrels who think the world to be
not only a stage, but their
stage. Robertson, of course, like most televangelists, is
their paid stooge.
Rand herself, incidentally, did
exactly the same thing: those
in her inner circle, called "the Collective," were expected to cater to
her every whim. Thus the claim by some apologists that Objectivism is
somehow separable
from the way Rand lived her own life is completely false. Rand lived exactly
by the sophistry, and con artistry, she preached.
So when Galt makes
that pledge at the end of his speech, to neither live for the sake of
another man, nor ask another to live for his, he does he mean it? Well,
he half
means it. That is to say, he wants big corporations to be able
to make claims against
you and me, to treat and use
others (either as employees, customers, or geographical neighbors) to
their
own best interests, but at the same time he wants you and me
to
pledge not to make any claims upon them in turn. In this
way, the
rich and powerful can use that power to become even richer and more
powerful, and therefore to get themselves into an even stronger
position to dominate the
less powerful.
This is the way so called "free
enterprise" has
always
worked, and always will work, so long as the majority people getting
the proverbial short end of the stick are duped into falling for it.
The only thing new with Galt is that he is
trying to sell this now as a moral
creed,
trying to convince the under class that they are moral wretches if they
don't allow big business a free hand in maximizing profits. Thus in
essence, John Galt was
one of the biggest con artists in all of pulp
fiction.
More importantly and more significantly, we
will explain to you, as this site further develops, how all
of this
garbage, which Rand, with the help of her imaginary hero-friend, John
Galt, and her various minions (these
days, mostly the likes
of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage--- not to
mention Supreme Court nominees Judge Roberts and Alberto Gonzales) have
preached for so many decades, has
finally crept
into and poisoned American culture, creating a whole
new set of social and moral attitudes on
the part of the average American, who for the most part has never even heard
of Ayn Rand. (How it is possible for someone who has never even heard
of Rand to be influenced by her will be explained in
considerable
detail later, as we further develop the site. For now, suffice it to
say that it involves the sociological notion of habitus). And
it is this cultural poisoning, we
will argue, that has made it possible for American soldiers to torture
prisoners, and to kill innocent people, such as journalists and their
body guards, and then laugh at and poke fun of their victim's loved
ones.
With the
knowledge and insight we hope to impart, it is our hope that our site's
visitors
will then see the need, and be better equipped, to
help reawaken the dormant humanistic values of brotherly love,
compassion,
equality, and
community, that were born, and once flourished, here
in
America. And if all of us passionate patriots can all work
together to save America, as a man
named Ray Taliaferro likes to say, that should be a good first step in
saving the world because at the moment, it is the rulers of America
(and their corporate financial backers) that are hell bent on
destroying the world, if not through
global
warming, and if not through conventional war, then through nuclear
weapons in space. Why
you
ask? To what conceivable end? The answer to that one is really quite
easy when you
think about it: the capitalist system works on the profit motive, and
as it turns out, wars and destruction are extremely
profitable--- you make and sell the bombs to the
taxpayers, and then you get the reconstruction
contracts to rebuild what you destroyed (also funded by the same lower
and middle class taxpayers).
But it's not all merely for the sake of financial profit; it's also
for the
sake of the amusement
of those in control--- only, amusement
in the Harris and Klebold sense
of the term. But of course, George W. Bush is a little too
much of
a coward and
too much of a little weasel to do any of the actual shooting
himself (to say
nothing of bearing the direct personal consequences, as Harris and
Klebold did). He'd much rather have others, such as Casey
Sheehan, do
all of that for him, and simply play the part of a fighter aircraft
pilot in a San Diego publicity shot. In other words, George W.
Bush can best
be
understood as a bit of a cross between Harris and Klebold, a wanna be
Tom Cruise, and a video
game junkie. Only, the "game" W is playing is the real world. And as in
most violent video games, the more people he kills, the higher
his
score. And this just gets him off to no end. Notice, when you
understand
this, it is easy to also
understand why, when he was the governor of Texas, he just
about
had an orgasm when hearing Carla Faye Tucker (a true
Christian) had been put to death. An amoral man? Not
at all. According Ayn Rand's theory of Objectivism, George W.
Bush is
not
the sort of man who has lost, or
never known
morality, but on the contrary, the one who has discovered
it. (See Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged).

What
is www.antirand.org?Anti rand is new voice
on the web for
the promotion of freedom, reason, and compassion, as well
as universal human rights for all inhabitants
of this earth--- not just Americans, not just the super rich and
powerful,
and not just the executives of large corporations and their
stockholders. That is to say, we believe that every
person who walks this earth ought to be entitled to the same
freedoms, rights, and protections that are guaranteed (at
least in
theory) to every citizen of
the United States in the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution
known as the Bill of Rights (plus of course, the U.S.
Declaration
of Independence). We are further dedicated to opposing the
ever
accelerating trend toward privatization of public
property on
a global scale, and corporate domination of the political process---
indeed, we believe corporations should be taken out of the political
process entirely. As
this site intends to show, these disturbing trends were seeded
decades ago by the sophistry of novelist and
pseudo-philosopher, Ayn Rand. This site is therefore dedicated
not
only to exposing the numerous contradictions and fallacies
contained in Rand's own writings, but those being promulgated
today by her present day
followers, admirers, and
advocates. These include, but are not limited to, Fed Chairman
Alan Greenspan (a protege and close personal friend of Rand's), SEC
Chairman Christopher Cox, a self proclaimed Rand admirer, Rush
Limbaugh, and the Ayn Rand
Institute of Irvine, California. In brief, while Ayn Rand claimed
to be a champion of liberty and human
rights, all of the evidence points in exactly the opposite
direction: that
freedom for
Ayn Rand, in the final analysis, meant nothing more and
nothing less than freedom
of the rich, the powerful, and the deceptive to oppress,
dominate, and
control--- and the freedom
of the rest of us to submit to their domination, accepting it as an
objective "fact of reality." And what is more, that such a small, rich,
and powerful minority should exercise dominion over the rest, seeking
only it's own self interest, with little or no concern for the rest of
humanity, and that the rest of humanity should accept it, Rand claimed
was a moral
necessity dictated by reason itself (on the supposed
ethical basis of what she called rational
self interest).
Most amazing of all, the followers of Rand, who uncritically
accepted this and the rest of the nonsense which Rand called
Objectivism, Rand dubbed new
intellectuals.
This, we submit, is Orwellian New Speak par excellence.
The purpose of this site therefore, is to expose Objectivism for the
metaphysical, epistemological, and logical nonsense, and moral evil,
that it truly is.
Was Ayn Rand correct about anything?
Yes, we
think that recent history shows, beyond question, that Ayn
Rand
was indeed correct about one
thing: that ideas
do have consequences. For example,because
of George W. Bush's ideas about budget priorities (the idea that his
misadventure in
Iraq was a higher priority than levee reinforcement in New
Orleans,
and that 40% of Louisiana's National Guard had more important
work to do in Iraq than they did back at home), tens of
thousands
of
New Orleans' sick, elderly, poor, and disabled are now either
dead, or breathing their last breaths. No, these people were not killed
by any "natural disaster," they were killed by George W. Bush and the
Republican Party's 2001 budget ax. Did the
fact that New Orleans was a predominantly African American City, and
the knowledge that mass deaths there would likely increase the strength
of the Republican
party in the region, enter into the budget considerations?
Could
it be said that Bush and the Republicans didn't exactly gamble
the lives of these people away, but actually
figured that
such a disaster (which would not only kill people, but raise crude oil
prices, and therefore oil company profits) as a potential boon
to
their interests? Oh, no; we
would never
suggest that.

Now, just
who is Ayn Rand? Her followers say she
was the greatest mind
that ever lived.
We at Anti rand say something quite the opposite. Ayn
Rand (1905--1982), was born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg Russia.
Her adopted first
name, correctly pronounced,
sounds nothing at all
like "Ann,"
but more
like "ion" or "eye'n" but somewhat compressed into one syllable. After
emigrating to the United States in her late teens, and a few
unimportant (for our purposes here) career detours along the way, she
became one of America's best known novelists and essayists, to
the
point of gaining something of a cult following
beginning in the late 1950s with the publication of her
magnum
opus, a novel called Atlas
Shrugged.
Although
the "Rand movement" probably peaked in 1968 (the time of her
"repudiation" of former associates Nathaniel and Barbara
Branden, after Nathaniel broke off a long running romantic
affair
with Ayn, known to both of their respective spouses), her
influence remains enormous to this day--- both directly and indirectly.
In fact, the recent
movement toward "privatization" of everything
from roads to
water supplies might well be seen as the fulfillment of a Randian dream
of a half century ago. All
property, Rand held, should be privately held.
But Ayn Rand did not stop with
political
theory. Indeed, she herself claimed that her entire political
theory was based on a metaphysical,
epistemological, and
moral philosophy of her own invention, one which she called
Objectivism. In brief, the metaphysics of Rand's Objectivism says that
the basis of all knowledge is the so called "axiom of existence" which
says existence exists.
Her Objectivist epistemology,(theory of knowledge) in brief, says that
things really areas
we perceive them (whether this applies to such things as mirages in
the desert or on the road, Rand never quite got around to telling us).
The basis of Objectivist ethics, finally, is selfishness--- or more
precisely, what Rand called "rational self interest." But such an
ethics, as we shall prove, turns out to be nothing more and nothing
less than a philosophical nihilism
--- quite the opposite of the "absolutism" Rand claims it to be.
This initial page is
just a start for an
entire project The plan is, eventually, to critically
discuss
all aspects of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. In the end, we intend
to show that Ayn Rand was anything but the voice of freedom
and
reason she claimed herself to be., and that if she is seriously to be
regarded as part of the history of Western philosophy at all, she marks
its nadir.

What is
fundamentally wrong with Objectivism?Basically, everything--- beginning with
the
supposed "axiom of existence" which according to Rand says "existence
exists" and "A is A." Rand attributes this nonsense to
Aristotle,
but the truth of the matter is that Aristotle never said anything of
the sort. "A is A" was first formulated about 320 (not 2300) years ago
by the German
(not Greek) philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (in a
posthumous work of his called the New Essays)
as a "truth of reason." Such "truths of reason," according to
Leibniz, told you absolutely nothing about anything actually
existent--- whether a given thing (e.g., Bigfoot or UFOs) did or did
not exist, or about any sort of objective reality. What is more,
neither Aristotle, nor Leibniz, nor any other real philosopher
I
know has ever claimed that "existence exists." Why not? Because every
other philosopher prior to Rand (and for the most part, since) has
realized that the assertion is not only meaningless (as some
critics of Rand have argued) but outright false. This link
explains why. What
is so terribly wrong with Objectivism?

What
is fundamentally wrong with Rand's theory of knowledge? her basic
Objectivism?
Basically, what is wrong is that she claims to know the way things as
they "really are," as they "really exist" independently of
human
cognition or knowledge. But this is, in effect, a contradiction: the
claim of a super knowledge, in a manner of speaking, beyond knowledge,
which nobody has.
Sure, it's reasonable to assume that there are things in this world
that exist independently of human cognition, the noumenalworld, or the Ding an such,
as Kant put it in German, or the "thing in itself" as we generally
translate that phrase into English. But how can we talk about such
things as they are "in and of themselves," independently of
human cognition?
Clearly, we humans only know
what we know. We don't
know what we
don't know. But Rand is claiming to know that which, by
definition, by her own admission, is not known---
the world of things, untouched by human knowledge. This is
patently absurd.
But Ayn Rand has a response to this
simple truism, first formulated by Kant (with his "neumenal-phenomenal" distinction). She throws a little
girlish temper tantrum, and lambastes poor old Immanuel Kant
as "morally evil," "an enemy of
man's mind"--- while at the same time
plagiarizing from him elsewhere. That is to say, Rand seems to think
she can win the argument with
screams, shrieks, pouts, and
pretentious sanctimonious moral outrage. Nowhere does Rand
even try
to attack Kant's argument. This is why we call her by such names as pseudo philosopher
and sophist,
and why it's quite literally a joke to call this woman an intellectual (to
say nothing of her blind followers). For further discussion on the
basic problem of epistemology, see my What
is Knowledge?

Need
a
short introduction to Objectivism?
Follow the link below to my One Drachma Course in
Objectivism. The one drachma charge is purely voluntary. If paid at
all, it must
be paid in
drachmas. But as far as I know, they haven't minted these
coins
for 2300 or more years, so they're a bit hard to find these
days.
Should you be visiting the ancient ruins of Athens some time in the
near future, you might look around on the ground. Perhaps the ancient
Greeks threw these 1 drachma coins around the way we Americans
do
pennies. (In case anyone wonders, yes, I do stoop to pick up
pennies. It's a big thrill for me when I find one--- something for
nothing, as the saying goes. Plus, they come in very handy at times).A
One Drachma Course in Objectivism.

What do we mean by Universal Human Rights?
A very good question with a very precise answer--- one that is the
result of an enormous, heroic, group
effort on the part of
several
people (among them Eleanor Roosevelt), spearheaded by two great
philosophers (real
philosophers) from the middle of the 20th century: Jacques Maritain and
Richard P. McKeon. McKeon will
be familiar to some readers of this
site as the notorious "Chairman" character in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance.
But forget Pirsig's paranoid description of him; the truth is
that
the man was nothing less than a sage. Follow this link to that answer. Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
What is fundamentally Wrong with Ethical Egoism? Some
people will be surprised to learn that Ayn Rand's theory of "ethical
egoism" (or As Rand herself put it more simply, "selfishness," or more
verbosely, "rational self interest") really didn't originate with Ayn
Rand. Rand was simply the first publicly recognized figure to take the
theory seriously.
And the
reason for this is quite simple: Ethical Egoism, as a moral theory, has
one fundamental problem: you cannot preach it without at the same time violating
it! That is to say, if I am truly selfish, the last thing in the world
I want is for you or anyone else to be selfish--- on the contrary, I
want them
to be altruists, especially in their dealings with me. That is why no real philosopher
has ever taken ethical egoism very seriously--- it's quite literally a
philosopher's joke (much like "The Society for
Solipsism"). But
Rand claims that the theory can be made valid if one realizes that reason
dictates that I recognize the equal right to be selfish for everyone.
But in fact, this introduction of the term "rational" in the name of
the theory only makes the theory more absurd. If I do in fact recognize
the right of others to promote their own selfish ends, even when the
realization those
ends is detrimental to me, I am thereby unselfishly contradicting
my own principle of selfishness! Ergo: Rand's is in
actuality a theory of irrational
self interest. However, as we shall explain
below, if you
have attained above average political influence, power, and wealth, you
begin coming out ahead with this theory. And the more powerful,
wealthy, and influential you are, the bigger a win it is for you. But
by the same token, the poorer and less powerful you are, the
worse deal it is for you.
The way this works is not difficult to
see. Simply put, the more power, wealth, and influence you have, the more selfish
you are able to be, for the simple reason that you have a greater
ability to advance your own selfish interest. What those of far less
power and influence are able to do to further their own interests
is small in comparison to what you're
are able to do to advance yours.
So, how does this work out practically, when
poor and powerless people (e.g., the majority of people in Kansas who
vote Republican) who are not, as the saying goes, "the sharpest tools
in the
shed," accept the hypothesis that everyone
has an equal right to be selfish?
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer! Again, this is an entirely
predictable result for the simple reason that
the rich have far greater means at their disposal to pursue their own
selfish ends, thus ensuring that they're going to come out way ahead on
this raw deal. To put it another way, Rand's moral
theory becomes a proverbial stacked deck---
stacked in favor of the rich, the powerful, and the
manipulative. To put it still another way, Rand's Objectivist Ethics
is a con game, pure and simple, against the uneducated (or very poorly
educated) poor. And interestingly enough, Rand herself had a phrase
which
fits
this quite well (although she didn't apply it in this way): the sanction of the victim.
That is to say, the poor or middle class person who has to struggle to
make ends meet, and possibly doesn't get the medical treatment he or a
family member needs, yet buy into Rand's sucker morality,
honestly believes it right and just that he should struggle as
he
does, and be denied needed medical
treatment. Nietzsche
likewise had a phrase for this, although he didn't apply it in
this way either: the
slave morality. For Nietzsche slave morality
was the morality slaves invented for themselves, and used against the
former masters; here, it's the morality invented or promoted by the former
masters for
the slaves, for purposes of duping the freed slaves into voluntarily
putting themselves back into a condition of servitude toward the
masters.
But Rand is not exactly an
innovator here. The kind of socio-political and
economic
"raw deal" we get from Ayn Rand long predates her, although it
went by different names--- such as individualism.
Why individualism? Because
like Rand's (admittedly slightly more
nutty) theory of rational
self interest, older theories of individualism
work on the exact same lie of inequality--- that the worker and the big
corporation, for example, are "equal parties" in a "free"
employment contract. Why aren't they equal? And why isn't this truly a
"free trade" deal? Because the individual worker needs the job a lot
more than Henry Ford, say, needs the worker. The worker and his family
go hungry if he and Ford aren't able to agree on wages and working
conditions; Ford merely hires someone else, and the assembly lines keep
moving. No, we are certainly not saying individuals should not have
rights--- quite the contrary. We are simply saying that in conservative
economic theories (as advanced by some personal friends of
mine, I
must confess), so called "free market individualism" works against the
best interests of most individuals; it is that which we at
Anti rand oppose. (By
"we," I mean not just me, but those who support my effort here
as well).
What is this Ayn Rand Institute all about? Perhaps this
question
can best be answered, at least initially, with a concrete example of
the sort of thing these folks do. Specifically, I am referring
to
something I
wrote a few years ago in response to an outdoor bulletin board posting
at my local community
college. That is to say, the link below will be to a rebuttal counter
post I made at the time to a posted short essay produced by a
member of the staff of the Ayn Rand Institute. This posting, which I
accidentally found while perusing a campus bulletin board,
immediately made me realize that the world was still being
haunted by the ghost of this horrible woman, Ayn Rand, and the
dark shadow cast by her supposed "ideas." It is also what
prompted me to write my book (yet
to be published) about
Rand, and how her ideas have slowly crept into and poisoned
American culture--- almost
without anyone directly realizing it. Specifically, the original post
(which I will not mirror here for copyright reasons) was an indirect
but brutal attack on intellectual freedom, in the thinly
veiled
guise of an
attack a class of people which fascists and authoritarian minded people
have always loved to hate: college professors. Why? Because college
professors by and large are the thinkers
of a society, and represent the most significant single threat to the
ruling power structure. Your
teachers

Below are a number of links which should be of interest to at least
some of my site's visitors. Not only that, these links (and reciprocal
links) help sites such as this get noticed by search engines such as
Goggle. Cool Links

NOTE:
This website is still in its infancy. Please be patient
with the rudimentary layout and organization. Everything
I now know about web site development and web hosting I
learned within the last 5 days, so I'm still
learning .
---- The Moose Man
August 23, 2005.

By the way, I also compose original music in the classical
tradition (string quartets, preludes, and so on), and do crazy
arrangements, with mega counterpoint, of traditional and
popular tunes. This one I did to commemorate this year'sSan
Clemente Street Festival. So, if you're in the mood for
something happy and lively, download my computer generated
mp3. It's a little under 5 megabytes in size. Happy MusicOr, if you prefer something a bit mere on
the serious side,
please give a listen to my string quartet, written in the
early part of 2005:First Movement. Second Movement, Third Movement,Fourth Movement,
Fifth Movementor to a short Prelude
in A Major for Clarinet and Piano which I wrote a short time later.

More content to come as well. If you wish to
email me, please do so at moose@antirand.org
If you think you'd like to submit something for posting on this website,
send the item as ascii text (no attachments will be viewed) to:
submissions@antirand.org